Show Review: Sleaford Mods @ The Echoplex

Show Review:
Sleaford Mods
@ The Echoplex
April 9th, 2017

   England's reigning working class talk-rap duo delivered the goods last night to a crowd of predominantly older, male and English non working class fans, their first show in Los Angeles.  The easiest catch phrase to describe Sleaford Mods is "post-Brexit the Streets/Mike Skinner."  That capsule summary doesn't do justice to the magnetism and delivery of rapper/talker/singer Jason Williamson.  Sleaford Mods are a genuinely compelling live act perhaps because of their bare bones aesthetic.

 You can count me as convinced by their performance last night

Clearing Warrants in Southern California

   I just put up this new web page for clearing warrants in Southern California: CLEAR SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WARRANTS.

  I've noticed there is a need for this service all over Southern California, because our Court system generates many different warrants, and they pop up on back ground checks, they interfere with obtaining a driver's license, and of course, they can cause you to get arrested in an otherwise non-arrest-able situation like a traffic stop.  The situation is especially perilous for those who are not in the country legally, they risk falling into the hands of Federal officials.

   The first question that people ask is, "Do I have a warrant?"  The answer to this question is often available from the facts that people possess when they call me for the first time.  There are three major categories of warrants.  The first is the "bench" warrant, typically issued in traffic and misdemeanor cases, most often because the individual charged with the traffic infraction or misdemeanor does not appear for a scheduled court appearance.    The second is the arrest warrant.  Most people think all warrants are arrest warrants, but this is not true.  Bench warrants are a lower priority for law enforcement and do not result in an arrest if you come into contact with a police officer.

   Arrest warrants are issued in felony cases or if someone misses a court appearance or for a misdemeanor after the case has started.  Thus, if you know of a scheduled court appearance, and know that the person involved didn't make that court appearance, it is highly likely that a warrant has been issued, either bench or arrest. The exceptions are when the case itself is filed.  For example, if you are arrested for driving under the influence, and it turns out that your blood alcohol level was under .08, you likely won't be charged, and so if you don't show up, and the case isn't issued, no warrant is issued.

  95% of the time, any confusion can be resolved by figuring out whether the underlying case that resulted in the missed court appearance was actually filed.  In traffic cases, tickets always result in the case being filed (an infraction, usually), in misdemeanors the likelihood varies by type of crime and jurisdiction.  Felonies are filed some of the time after arrest, but not always.  If a court date has been missed, the easiest way to verify the existence of a case is to find the appropriate county court website and search their party case index.  This typically works for felony and misdemeanor cases, but may or may not work for traffic cases.

 If you have determined that a warrant exists, you can clear it by either appearing at the appropriate court house yourself, or you can hire a lawyer to do it for you.  For traffic infractions and misdemeanors, a lawyer can appear for you, but for felonies you need to go- preferably in the company of a lawyer.

 When people call me about traffic warrants, I typically recommend they handle it themselves (unless they are out of the area.)   Misdemeanors can also be handled by the person with the warrant, but a lawyer is a better value for these cases, since they can require several court appearances.  Trying to appear on a Felony warrant by yourself will clear the warrant, but often results in the arrest of the person appearing.  A lawyer may be able to help you avoid being arrested for a felony warrant, but typically the person will need to post bail, on top of what they pay their lawyer.

  Unfortunately, warrants do not go away, so the only option is to deal with it, or to have the warrant remain outstanding forever.

New Book Review: Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made by Steve Miller

Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made by Steve Miller. The cover art may be the  best part.

New Book Review:
Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made
 by Steve Miller
Publication date is July 12th, 2016
Da Capo Press
(PURCHASE ON AMAZON)

   The Insane Clown Posse and their fans, called Juggalos, make occasional entrances into the general popular culture.  They are know for their yearly festival, The Gathering, for being designated as a gang by the FBI (and fighting back) and for their horror-clown aesthetic.   They also make music, and run their own record label, :Psychopathic Records, which has spawned it's own universe of Inane Clown Posse fellow-travelers.  Even a neutral observer would have to say that the Juggalo sub-culture spawned by the Insane Clown Posse rates low on any scale of cultural sophistication, and high on the actual constituent elements of what makes a cohesive subculture:  shared values, physical proximity to one another and, most importantly, alienation from the dominant popular culture.

  It's impossible to over-state the importance of that last strand: alienation from the dominant popular culture.  Being a Juggalo, as revealed by the many interviews with the Artists themselves, employees and journalists who have covered the Juggalos in the national print/online media world, is very much an us vs. them mentality.   In this way, Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made made me think of the rise of Donald Trump and his appeal to supporters.  One astonishing difference, or perhaps, not at all astonishing difference, is the utter lack of any political element to the Juggalos and Insane Clown Posse.  You would think from the level of intense scrutiny paid by law enforcement and the demeaning stereotypes foisted upon Juggalos by the mainstream media that they were terrorists, or at least fascists, or at least racists, but the Juggalos seem to be none of these things.

   Miller takes care portraying the many Juggalos who are just plain folks, often with skilled tech service/industry type jobs, and families. Unfortunately, more time is spent detailing the various travails and conflicts between Insane Clown Posse and the world at large, most memorably their tussle, ongoing, with the FBI over their designation as a criminal street game.  A decision that, on it's face, seem incomprehensible to anyone with even a loose knowledge of Juggalo culture and music, seems even  more bizarre after reading the source material for the underlying decision.  Surely, law enforcement in versed in street gang culture would recognize the difference between Juggalos and a criminal street gang?  Sadly, no.

   There are many aspects of the Insane Clown Posse and Juggalo culture that are easy to deem as admirable, regardless of how you feel about the music.  The worth ethic, for one.  The ability to build a DIY label operation, for a second.  And, at some level, the ingenuity that it took for a couple of nowhere nobodies to create an entire eschatology and what is essentially an ideology, or at least a "way of life" for adherents.

 In a tantalizing chapter, Miller, talks to a Juggalo who has actually started a church.  One would think, considering the tax implications, that this is something Violent J and Shaggy Too Dope would at least be contemplating at this point.  I think probably the hang up is that they are both actually practicing Christians, something I gleaned not from this book, which skirts the awkward reality that both Violent J and Shaggy Too Dope are Middle Aged dads, with sons serving in the United States military.

  The downside to this book is the writing style, which is sub-New Yorker prose.  Perhaps the style is calculated to appeal to Juggalos themselves, though, and I say this with all due respect, it's hard to imagine many of the people profiled in this book picking up one themselves to read.

Book Review: The Trees (2016) by Ali Shaw

The Trees by Ali Shaw,  published in paperback on August 2nd, 2016

Book Review:
The Trees (2016)
by Ali Shaw
Paperback edition published on August 2nd, 2016
Published by Bloomsbury USA
(Buy Hardcover version on Amazon)


   Ali Shaw is a young English novelist.  He lives and works in Oxford.  The Trees is his third novel, coming after The Girl With Glass Feet (2011), which was lauded as the top debut novel by the Desmond Elliot Prize.  He followed The Girl With Glass Feet with The Man Who Rained (2013). All three books combine elements of magical realism and fairy tale's with standard Anglo-American characters dealing with difficult emotional issues made worse by circumstance.

  In The Trees, that circumstance is a Day-of-the-Triffids-meets-The-Road style plant uprising.  In a single night, global civilization is utterly annihilated, and the survivors are left to make their way in a world that is fairly benign when compared to say, the nightmarish dystopias of The Road and The Walking Dead, but worse than a world where one can pop down to the Tesco for a rotisserie chicken.  Adrien Young, the married, childless protagonist is very much a pop down to the Tesco for a rotisserie chicken type of guy.  On the night of the tree uprising-apocalypse, he is winding up a year of "searching for himself" at the behest of his to-good-for-him wife, currently on a work trip to Ireland.
 
 He quickly hooks up with a troupe of survivors, a hippie single mom and her tech savvy mom and a young Japanese tourist who happens to be aces with a slingshot. They have episodic adventures of the sort one might expect in a book of this type, and there is also a larger plot concerning Adrien and his destiny.  The most unusual and distinctive aspect of The Trees is the creation of Adrien as not an anti-hero but a non-hero, a literary equivalent of Seinfeld's George Costanza, thrust into the post-apocalypse world.

  At 500 pages in length, The Trees isn't exactly a challenging read, but it's not something you can take down in a weekend.  It is extremely, extremely easy to see this work being adapted either for English or American TV or Film.   It's long enough to warrant a series on television, but compact enough to be turned into a stand alone feature film.  Given the popularity for apocalyptic themes in popular culture, such a move would be expected.

  Shaw successfully skirts the line between adult subject matter and writing something that sophisticated adolescents can enjoy.  There are moments of graphic violence, but nothing more upsetting than anything on television today (and significantly less violent than comparable cross-media properties like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead.
  

Time: A Vocabulary of the Present edited by Amy Elias and Joel Burges

Book Review
Time: A Vocabulary of the Present
edited by Amy Elias and Joel Burges
Published in August, 2016
by New York University Press

   It's true, I like to dabble in what you might call "critical theory."   I'm not a huge fan of French post-modernist philosophers, but there is no denying that they have swayed the majority of people who talk about cutting edge philosophical/social science type theories in the American University system.  So I went into Time: A Vocabulary of the Present expecting to see many, many, many references to German and French philosophers who wrote in the mid to late 20th century.  I was not disappointed.  Time: A Vocabulary of the Present is an up-to-date anthology of recent academic theorizing about the role of time inside and outside the academy, but heavy on theory that is only of interest to people with academic level interest in the subject ("Time Studies.")

  The introduction, Time Studies Today, by the editors, lays out the contours of the time studies field.  It's part French post-modern philosophy, partly a continuation of the post-post-modern "linguistic" and "spatial" turns in cultural studies and partly a product of cultural studies itself.   Time: A Vocabulary of the Present is divided into three parts.  Part I, Time as History: Periodizing Time has five paired chapter.  Each chapter is a different opposition illustrating an aspect of time.  So,  Past/Future, Extinction/Adaptation, Modern/Altermodern, Obsolescence/Innovation, and Anticipation/Unexpected.   Editor Amy Elias' essay on Past/Future, with an informative discussion of "retro futurism" was a stand out in this portion of the book.

    Elias accurately describes the paradoxical impact of the internet, "in the analogue era, everyday life moved slowly...but the culture as a whole felt like it was surging forward.  In the digital present, everyday life consists of hyper-acceleration and near instantaneity...but on the macro-cultural level things feel static and stalled.  We have this paradoxical combination and standstill.  This combination is what I call "techno duration" and in it, the present spreads like a tsunami wave over the past."

    From there, Elias builds up the concept of "retro-futurism" where we imagine an alternative future from an imaginary past.  Retro futurism is at the heart of many cultural trends of the recent past and present, so possessing a theoretical background on the development of retro futurism, provided by Elias in the course of her essay, is well taken.

   Part II of Time: A Vocabulary of the Past is Time as Calculation: Measuring Time.  Here, Time Studies is on the more familiar ground of horology (the study of time measurement with watches and clocks.)   Here, the pairings consciously acknowledge this theoretical pre-history, Clock/Lived, Synchronic/Anachronic, Human/Planetary, Serial/Simultaneous, Emergency/Everyday, Labor/Leisure,  Real/Quality.   The third and final part of Time is Time as Culture: Mediating Time.   This third part if firmly derived from the field of cultural studies.  References to comic books and modern art abound.

  The footnotes and bibliographical essays are both excellent and this book is worth acquiring simply for the up to date reference notes, if you are interested in the field of time studies in any serious way.

The Man with the Compound Eyes (2014) by Wu Ming-Yi

Book review
The Man with the Compound Eyes (2014)
by Wu Ming-Yi

      What about contemporary literature?  I'm getting there.  A notable absence from the 1001 Books list is anything originally written in Chinese.  The Man with the Compound Eyes was Yi's first work of fiction translated into English, but he's been writing fiction and non-fiction in Chinese for fifteen years.   Yi is from Taiwan, and The Man with the Compound Eyes is memorably set on the East coast of Taiwan, a region little known in the West.  Eastern coastal Taiwan is populated by a mix of Taiwanaiese born Han Chinese and different Taiwanese aboriginal peoples.  Specifically, the Amis and Bunun both figure prominently.

   Located someplace between Latin American style magical realism and futuristic speculative fiction, the plot combines intercultural romance, the disastrous consequences of climate change on coastal communities and the great "trash vortex" in the Pacific ocean.  The translation by Darryl Sterk does an excellent job of maintaining the idiomatic characteristics of Yi's text.

   The heart of The Man with the Compound Eyes, like great many novels, tells the story human emotions in some interesting place.  The eastern coast of Taiwan is interesting as a setting, as are the various speculative/science fiction/magical realism touches.  It all combines in memorable fashion.

Posts Discussing Country Music

Show Review: Jason Isbell at the Wiltern, Los Angeles, CA. (8/13/15)

Show Review: Stagecoach 2015 (4/28/15)

Show Review: Way Over Yonder Fest Day 1 (9/27/14)

Museum Review: Country Music Hall of Fame (5/21/14)

Stagecoach 2014:  Of beer, trucks & cut-offs and the sublime (4/28/14)

Book Review Meeting Jimmie Rodgers by Barry Mazor (4/15/14)

Book Review: The Roots of Texas Music edited by Lawrence Clayton and Joe Specht (9/13/11)

Show Review: Willie Nelson's Country Showdown (6/24/11)

12 Hrs in Bakersfield California (5/31/11)

Buck Owens and the Bakersfield Sound (5/23/11)

Movie Review: Earl Scruggs- Bluegrass Legend (7/27/10)

Book Review: That Selling Sound by Diane Pecknold (6/5/10)

Book Review: Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits by Mark Binelli

Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hitts by Mark Binelli comes out on May 3rd 2016,.

Book Review:
Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits
by Mark Binelli
Metropolitan Books
Published May 3rd, 2016
(AMAZON BUY LINK)



  Author Mark Binelli writes both fiction and non-fiction.  He published a novel, Sacco and Vincetti Must Die, back in 2002.  In 2006 Detroit City is the Place to Be, a work of non-fiction about his hometown, was published.  In between he's contributed articles to Rolling Stone, where he is a contributing editor, and other publications.

  Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits treads the line between "creative non-fiction" and regular old literary fiction with a healthy contribution from the well known 33 1/3 series of books about specific albums and musicians.  Binelli has written an account of the life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the fifties rocker who is immortal for his hit, I Put a Spell On You.   Hawkins was also in on the ground floor of the mid 50s rock explosion, touring on one of the many package tours put together by radio DJ Alan Freed.

   Anyone with even a passing interest in the 33 1/3 series, early rock history or the idea of "creative non fiction" as a rival to traditional literature is likely to find much to like.  Those more accustomed to a traditional novel may not be as responsive, though it's hard to say that this novel doesn't succeed in exactly what it wants to do.  The only possible complaint might be lack of ambition, but it's not a complaint I would make.

   Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits is certain to find shelf space in independent book stores all over the country.  Just the title alone should be good for decent sales from people who are browsing at their favorite book store down the street.

Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist by Hazel V. Canby

Francis Harper, the first African American female novelist.

Book Review
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
by Hazel V. Canby
p. 1987
Oxford University Press

   Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, traces the origins of novels written by African American authors prior to the breakthrough of Zora Hurston in the 1930s, and Alice Walker and Toni Morrison after that.   Two of the books discussed, Nella Larsen's Passing and Uncle Tom's Cabin (not written by an African-American) have been discussed here as part of the 1001 Books Project.  Others were wholly unfamiliar to me because they have failed to become "classics" and are therefore not taught or discussed with any regularity.

  Two major authors in this book with whom I was previously unacquainted are Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.  Hopkins, in particular, wrote a great deal of fiction while she was editrix of a Boston-based African-American literary magazine in the first few years of the 20th century.  Harper's primary work is Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), generally called the first full length novel by an African-American female writer.  Hopkins wrote several novels, but three of these were only published in her magazine and never as stand alone editions.  Her stand alone novel was Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900).

 Canby is particularly forceful in arguing for the canonical inclusion of Iola Leroy and Contending Forces.  She also advocates for Larsen's two 1001 Books inclusions: Passing and Quicksand.  It was in fact, those two novels which spurred me to read this book, to perhaps see if there were other "lost classics" out there.  Canby didn't quite convince me, but I'm sure that her analysis would come as a revelation to anyone interested in the field of African-American studies.

  Her prose is somewhat studded with the archaism's of late 20th century deconstructionist literary critics, always regrettable, but here the academic blah blah is outweighed by the usefulness of her discussion about these little known (to me) texts and authors,

Book Review: The Luminaries by Elanor Catton

Book Review:
The Luminaries
by Elanor Catton
Little, Brown and Company, published October 15th, 2013


   The 1001 Books to Read Before You Die edition I own stops in 2005.  That is almost a decade of reading to account for.  The Luminaries caught my eye as the type of book editors might select based on it being a winner of the Man Booker Prize, and written by a 20 something author, who is female and is also from New Zealand.  If there is one thing I've learned from the 1001 Books series is that they are looking to incorporate diverse viewpoints in terms of race, gender and ethnicity.   The Luminaries is essentially an old-west detective story, set on the west coast of New Zealand in the 1860s.

   The detective novel itself was not invented, but popularized in 1868 by The Moonstone, written by Wilkie Collins.  Collins was a cohort of Charles Dickens and very much immersed in the same milieu: The Moonstone was published in serial form first, and bears many of the characteristics of the writing of that period: long digressions, a surplus of plot and character and a fondness for the Eastern/ Exotic/Spiritual/Supernatural.
 
    I'm not sure one would have to be familiar with the history of detective and horror fiction in the mid to late Victorian period to fully appreciate Catton's accomplishment, but I think the pull quote on the Amazon.com product page nails it: "Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new." - New York Times Book Review.

   Thus, if you aren't familiar with this literary genre, you won't appreciate the parodic element of The Luminaries, and might be left with the impression that Catton is writing a straight forward, albeit accomplished, piece of genre fiction.  This world is explored in The Maniac in the Cellar, a book I read back in June- but the gist is that the world of the supernatural and detectives overlapped in the 1860s, and spiritualism was very much en vogue as well.   Thus, The Luminaries manages to avoid any kind of anachronistic plot points while also updating the style of prose to avoid the excesses of the mid 19th century sensationalists.

   The 800 page length might seem excessive, but again, by the standards of the mid 19th century novel, and the sensationalist genre, she has created something that would take well to the serial format of that period, which emphasized length and incident.  In other words she has created something along the lines of the best of both worlds, and done it so subtly that it is entirely possible to buy, read, enjoy, and publicly comment upon The Luminaries without even being aware of that level of development.

  In the sum total, The Luminaries is both a summer beach type page turner and a literary achievement, recalling many of the strengths of the pre-modern novel while incorporating a variety of tips and tricks from the modernist writers and their ilk.